Advocacy: Achieving the Customer Experience ideal
Wouldn’t it be great if you could build your business without having to spend any money on sales and marketing?
For most businesses, of course, this is an impossible ideal. Even the biggest companies with the strongest reputations continue to spend millions every year to ensure that their brands stay ‘front-of-mind’. However there are some businesses that somehow manage to grow exponentially; seemingly without significant effort. The million-dollar secret is understanding how they do it.
The perfect scenario would be that every customer you acquired through traditional marketing means recommended you to two or three other people who then all became customers. But what makes a customer want to ‘evangelise’ about a product or service? Is it possible to grow your business through advocacy alone?
At Jericho, understand that the ‘golden prize’ of customer advocacy is achieved through the right balance between promising, designing and delivering the right experience for customers.
‘Moments of Truth’
For many years, figures have been posted on the internet about how much cheaper it is to keep an existing customer versus acquiring new one. If they’re to be believed, then the statistics make an compelling argument. The US Office of Consumer Affairs has recently stated that…
“It’s five times cheaper to keep a client than to get a new one”
There is certainly no doubt that for many organisations, there has been and continues to be too much emphasis on acquiring new customers and not enough on keeping the current good customers. It can be argued that much of the 2008 Financial Services crash happened as a result of business & commercial banks’ unhealthy interest in gaining market share at any cost. Even today, the amount of money spent by many very large organisations on customer acquisition dwarfs the expenditure on customer retention and development programmes. However, all of this is quite a simplistic way of looking at customer experience management.
The growth in popularity of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems has also changed the landscape of, and people’s attitudes towards, customer experience. All too often, businesses might see the introduction of a new IT system as being the ideal solution, only to find that the customer experience issues remain long after the multi-million budgets have all been spent.
Although involving all of these elements, customer experience isn’t simply about ‘new customers versus old’ or ‘systems versus processes’. Many people have lost sight of the most important thing of all – the customer – and what they are experiencing, be that a customer who has been with the company for decades or one who is making their very first transaction. Customer experience is all about the bigger picture.
Many years ago, the former CEO of Scandinavian Airways, Jan Carlzzon, spoke at his annual conference about “Moments of Truth”, explaining that every single person in the company carried a responsibility towards the customer, as every single interaction between the business and the customer was a Moment of Truth – a point in time which might define the ongoing attitude of the customer towards the business as a whole. We refer to this as:
“Every touch-point with the customer is an opportunity to impress…or distress!”
At Jericho, our auditing process doesn’t only look at a particular part of the customer journey (such as a call centre or at the point of retention, which are often the sole focus of a customer experience audit), but the full end-to-end experience. We look at your business in the same way that a customer does. IT systems are useful in helping to build a great customer experience, however are not a “solution” in themselves; and simply need to be looked upon as tools of the building process.
Click here to find out about the Jericho methodology
